


Children of Darkness

by thenafics



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Bruce is actually Erebus, Poor Bruce, all of the batkids are demigods, and various other beings, he just accumulates kids, kind of a percy jackson au, primordial god of darkness, they terrify the world at large
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-04-14 10:08:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14133864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenafics/pseuds/thenafics
Summary: Somewhere along the line, the first child decides that the best name for a primordial deity of darkness is “Bruce.” Erebus (now Bruce) doesn’t really understand how he accumulated children numbers two and beyond or exactly how he went from Erebus to Bruce to Dad.





	1. Friendly Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> This is a crossover with the Percy Jackson mythology.   
> Erebus (literal personification of primordial darkness)=Bruce Wayne  
> Bruce basically ends up running his own kind of Camp for all of the kids he collects

Erebus awakens in the modern world for the first time early in the industrial revolution. The soot and smog of the cities block out the sun. He seeps back into being on coal smudged fingertips and accumulates a body made of ash. Erebus finds himself living in the darkened slums of Gotham city, where the high rises never let the sunlight touch the street. For the first time in his existence, he finds himself seeking the light.  
When the first war comes, he leaves for the plains of Europe. Other gods come to him, seeking his strength to lend their children in the war. Erebus refuses every time. Instead, he turns his attention to using his darkness to hide innocents and refugees. He takes as many children as he can away from the bombs and the gunfire, but it’s never enough. Erebus does not kill, he only protects those he can and it’s never enough, but the killing would make him share something with who he’s trying so desperately to protect these children from.  
The war ends and Erebus continues his existence in the haze of smoke in the speakeasies and the shadows of their moonshine nights. He is in the darkness of Gotham’s alleys once more. Erebus lingers in the hidden corners of minds, the memory of loss. They try to cover up his darkness with sequins and sink it in liquor, but no matter how they try to drown out the shadowy whispers of memory with jazz, they can never escape the darkness.  
The second war comes decades after the first and Erebus feels sick for the things that happen during the night (his night). Once more, the gods and their children call out to Erebus for aid, to be the turner of battle tides. Once more, he refuses, choosing again to save who he can. He can never save enough. When the war finally ends, he sleeps.  
The world moves on. Humans build suburbia and make space age palaces. They build places where people can pretend the dark can never reach them. Erebus slumbers in the back of every mind that remembers darkness and lingers in the dreams of every child who reaches out into the blackness of space to touch the stars.  
He wakes sometime in the early nineteen nineties for no reason in particular. Erebus finds himself in the shadows of Haly’s circus, watching the acrobats from where the spotlight makes the shadows seem deeper. He stands helpless when the rope snaps and a little boy watches his parents fall. Later, in the dead of night, he cloaks the boy in darkness when the gangsters who sawed through the ropes return to finish off the last Flying Grayson.  
“Who’s there?” asks the boy. For the child to have sensed him, there must be some of the blood of the gods in his veins. So Erebus pulls himself from the shadows to speak with a voice rusted from decades of disuse.  
“I am Erebus.”  
His voice is much deeper, much darker, than he remembers it being. The boy looks up at him with burning eyes, head cocked to one side almost like a bird.  
“That’s a weird name. Like one of the ones from mom and dad’s stories. Are you here to help me find the gangsters?”  
Erebus is struck by a sudden vision of this boy kneeling on a battlefield, alone amongst the dead and dying, victorious no matter the cost to himself. He sees a knife-bright smile and easy charm turned to manipulation. Instantly, Erebus knows that if he does not take this boy in, does not lead him away from the path of anger and revenge set before him, that the cost will be great. He can not abandon this boy. He must do more than just idly protect.  
“Yes. I will train you like the old heroes.”  
“Lead the way, Bruce!”  
“Who is Bruce?”  
“You, silly! It’s way less weird.”


	2. Not Until It's Too Late

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce isn't always entirely sure about what he's doing

       Erebus takes a little while to get used to being called Bruce instead of his name, but he finds he cannot deny the boy’s bright eyes any indulgences. He takes for his own an abandoned old manor and is surprised to find that the spirit of the place, Alfred, is actually happy to have Erebus and his ward there.Erebus hides the manor behind the thick shadows of the access roads. He restores it to its full glory inside, but is careful to keep the outside of the building decrepit. Alfred reminds him in a clipped British accent when he needs to feed his ward and what to do with injuries. He learns how to care about and care for the child in their hidden oasis in the hills of Gotham.

       Dick seems to be a natural at anything he puts his hand to. No matter what challenges or tests Erebus puts in front of him, the boy always finds a way to succeed, a way to win, even if it is non-traditional. Erebus begins to suspect that Dick has the blood of Nike in his veins after the sixth time he wins family game night, despite not knowing any of the games. Under Bruce’s tutelage and Alfred’s care, Dick quickly grows into the kind of person meant to be the stuff of legends. The problem comes when he starts to actually become it. He starts roaming outside of the safe little oasis that Bruce has created for him in the hills of Gotham. Dick finds Barbara one day and brings her over to the manor to meet Bruce. Bruce finds himself unsettled by the eyes of a fledgling Oracle picking apart his every move. She becomes just as much a member of his household as Dick is despite the fact that her sharp eyes burn into the darkness and that she sleeps under another roof most nights.

        He finds more friends who are also demigods and one summer he begs Bruce to let him go to a summer camp with them. He pleads and pleads until Bruce physically can’t say no. Bruce sulks most of the summer until Dick comes back from the camp, glowing with the golden light of Victory herself and bursting with stories. He tells Bruce about how he’s been claimed as Nike’s and about all the adventures he’s been having with his new friends. Over the year, the conflict between Bruce and Dick escalates to a breaking point just when the summer comes around again. He runs off to camp and comes back bright once more. The cycle repeats again and it breaks Bruce’s heart to realize that he’s suffocating Dick with his darkness. The next summer, Dick tells Bruce he wants to stay at camp for the whole year. They fight and yell and argue about it, but Bruce knows when he’s lost. He lets Dick go and sees him mostly on the holidays. Barbara’s bright eyes tell him that she knew, and even more so, knew he wouldn’t have listened.

       Bruce sulks in the manor and around Gotham for almost a year. Then he finds a boy stealing the tires off of a car he shouldn’t even be able to see. Bruce’s car, made of shadows and meant to drive through rather than around, had been parked next to a dumpster and veiled so heavily that not even the cleverest mortal should have been able to find it. Still, Bruce finds him with the car up on blocks and three wheels off. The boy hits him in the stomach with the tire iron and sprints away. Bruce finds him huddled in the deepest shadows of an abandoned apartment building. One reluctant McDonald’s trip later, Bruce is taking Jason back to the manor with him, protective instincts already kicked into overdrive for this boy he’s only just met.

       For a long time, Bruce isn’t sure just what he’s found with Jason. For the first few weeks, Jason’s standoffish behavior and ability to instigate conflict seemingly out of nowhere has Bruce praying that he didn’t somehow accidentally pick up a child of Ares. The way his conflicts with Dick escalate into near war has Bruce sighing and resigning himself to a peace less existence. Once Jason gets comfortable though, he’s borderline cuddly and his shell of aggression melts into a sort of soft shyness . He still has a tendency to be volatile under certain circumstances, but he becomes extremely attached to Bruce, Alfred, and to a lesser extent, Barbara and Dick. Maybe, Bruce hopes, he’s the child of some minor god of withheld love instead.

       It isn’t until Jason tries to run away that Bruce realizes what he’s had all along. Jason and Bruce argue and it gets to a point where Jason runs out in a fit of rage. Bruce sinks into his desk chair with a sigh, ready to wait out the storm of Jason’s anger. Then he hears a deafening crack from somewhere in the backyard, a crack like thunder, like the ground shattering. Bruce is out of his chair and into the backyard just int time to see Jason being dragged into the ground, a pale, earthen, hand clamped down over his mouth to silence his cries. Bruce is struck at once by the memory of Persephone, the earth opening beneath her, of walking with her in the gardens of the Underworld. How she had been soft and sweet and so quick to anger, so alive and like her mother with the iron in her spine. Bruce knows Jason isn’t Persephone’s, she has always been faithful and kind, but they are two of a kind. Bruce reaches out, flashing through the shadows in some vain hope of rescuing his son. He’s not quite fast enough and the last thing he sees of Jason are his hands, black with dirt and reaching out. Bruce watches as another of Demeter’s wild things is dragged away, not by Hades but to there at least, the laughter of Chaos in his wake.

**Author's Note:**

> And so Bruce was created. This may update pretty sporadically as I get inspired, so I'll do my best to make each chapter stand alone.


End file.
